How to Use Tinder (Safely!) While Traveling: Looking for Recommendations

If all you're looking for is recommendations, it's pretty hard to go wrong. Along with the tips about safety when it comes to your personal information found in the Intro Post, there are only a couple things you really need to make sure to do.

1. Tailor Your Profile/Settings

Although there's really no need to edit your profile very much, it does help to specify that you're visiting for a set amount of time, if only to give your matches a heads up as to what you're looking for. In this section, what's probably more important is making sure your settings are optimized so that your matches will be as helpful as possible.

Distance: You want your search radius to be fairly small so that you're hitting people who are familiar with the area you're in/looking for recommendations about.

Gender: You'll want to have the widest possible spread of people able to give you recommendations, so I suggest setting this to both.

Age: It's probably helpful to keep this one more on the narrow side so that you're getting responses relevant to people of your age (and thus interests)!

2. Swipe Strategically

You don't have to be very judicious in your swiping, but it helps to click through their profile to look for a few details. First, since you're looking for recommendations, you want to make sure that they're local or that they've been living in the area for a while.

Second, it might help to see if their description is written in English. At least that way you'll be able to guarantee that you'll understand each other.

But other than that, since you're not really looking to meet up, there's no need to be too careful about your matches. If the conversation starts to go in a direction you don't want it to, simply disconnect and move on to the next one.

Good Examples:

People who are familiar with the area + speak English (don't mind the distances in these screenshots!)

Bad Examples:

The first one seems unlikely to be able to communicate in English. The other just arrived and is likely to know as much about the area as you are.

3. Ask Away

It may be your first reflex to just sit and wait for your matches to message you first, but there's no need to play hard-to-get when you're not actually looking for a date. Feel free to copy/paste the same message to every match. Go crazy. Even if everyone doesn't answer you, the more people you message, the more responses you'll get!

Up next in the Tinder series: How to use Tinder to find a tour guide or someone to hang out with (platonically!) as a solo female traveller!